Who keeps your company's facts true?

Most company-knowledge tools are built around a single moment: the capture. They watch your tools, pull out the decisions and commitments and lessons, and answer questions from them. That part is a one-time build. The harder problem starts the day after, and it never ends. A fact that was true when captured slowly stops being true, and no one is accountable for noticing.

Pulse records who decided a thing. What it did not have, until now, is anyone accountable for keeping that thing correct as the world moves underneath it. Those are different jobs. The first is history. The second is maintenance, and maintenance is where company knowledge quietly rots.

The job nobody owns

Walk any six-month-old workspace and you will find the same pattern. A decision page that contradicts the current roadmap. A runbook that references a service that was renamed. A “source of truth” doc that two people privately know is wrong but neither has the standing to change. None of these are capture failures. The information was captured correctly. It went stale afterward, on no one’s watch.

The reason is structural, not lazy. The person who made the decision has moved on to the next one. The person who reads the stale page does not own it and assumes someone else is watching. And the system that stored the fact treated storage as the finish line. So the fact sits there, cited and load-bearing and increasingly wrong, until something breaks and a postmortem traces it back.

Why “the team maintains it” is the same as no one

The common answer is “everyone keeps the docs up to date.” In practice that means no one does, for a reason that has a name: diffusion of responsibility. When a duty is assigned to a group, each member assumes another member will handle it, and the more people share the duty, the less likely any single person acts. A fact owned by the whole team is owned by nobody.

The fix is not a dashboard that nags the whole channel. It is a name. One accountable person per fact, who gets told when their fact needs attention, and only then.

One owner, one task

Stewardship gives each important fact, a decision, a doc, a skill, a playbook, a single steward. Pulse already knows when something is off. It can see when a fact has aged past the point its kind stays reliable, when two sources disagree, when a skill has drifted from the behavior it was extracted from, when a decision was made but never recorded an outcome, and when an important fact has no owner at all.

When one of those fires, Pulse opens exactly one task and routes it to the steward. Not a broadcast. Not a manager report. One task, to the one person accountable, with a deadline set by the kind of problem. If it goes unanswered, a gentle reminder. If it goes overdue, a private nudge to a teammate or the workspace owners, carrying no detail about the fact itself. The steward confirms it is still true, updates it, hands it to someone with more context, or retires it.

The lines we will not cross

A maintenance system that routes work to people is one bad design decision away from becoming surveillance. So the constraints came first, before any of the mechanics.

• A human decides what is true.Pulse can notice a problem and even pre-fill a suggested update, but the suggestion is inert. It never edits a fact’s value on its own. A person’s click is the only thing that changes anything, and every change is reversible.
• No per-person scores, ever. The only health view is workspace totals: how many facts are owned, unowned, stale, or in conflict, and how long a refresh takes on average. There is no individual breakdown, no leaderboard, no manager x-ray. A test fails the build if anyone ever adds a per-person grouping.
• It only sees what you see.A steward is only ever shown tasks for facts they already have permission to read. Reassigning a fact cannot widen anyone’s access; the new owner has to already be able to see it. When someone leaves, their facts route to their team, never to whoever happens to be nearby.
• It is opt-in. Stewardship is off until an admin turns it on for a workspace. Nothing here runs silently in the background of a team that did not ask for it.

Why agents make this urgent

A stale doc a human reads is a small risk; the human usually notices something is off. A stale fact an agent reads and acts on is a larger one, because the agent executes it literally and at scale. The case for a single accountable owner gets stronger the moment software, not just people, starts depending on the fact being right. We made a related argument about extracted workflows in why human-authored AI workflows go stale.

The same discipline shows up in how Pulse’s own agents read. A company agent reads only what the person who built it can see, set by an explicit grant, and an agent with no grant reads nothing. Keeping the knowledge correct and keeping access honest are two halves of the same idea. The company’s memory is only useful if you can trust both what it says and who can see it.

Capturing what your company knows is the easy half. Keeping it true is the half that decides whether anyone can rely on it a year from now. Stewardship is our answer to the second half. Live walkthrough at pulsehq.tech.